General

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From my own experience in learning and teaching topics related to computers, computer knowledge will be more easily understood if we go straight with the keyboard (and mouse). Set a complete yet attainable goal and start with something small. During the process of achieving the goal, we learn various aspect of the application.

In this tutorial, the goal is to model a small house, and later will do some remodeling to the house by adding rooms and floors to the original model. Where do we start: Floor plan.

What is the Plan?

Here is what we are going to do. We'll start this tutorial by learning how to put your floor plan into SketchUp. From the floor plan, we will create floors and walls, add doors and windows, roofs and some other details. After the physical form of the house is completed, We would do some finishing work by adding material such tiling, paint, grass as you normally would to finish a home building.

During the making of the model, we will gradually learn concepts, tools and techniques for making 3-D model using Google SketchUp for Windows. Certainly at this tutorial stage, the house should be quite simple yet detailed so we can utilize most of tools and technique available in SketchUp.

In this scenario, this initial model is a two-room house on a 91 square meter land. At the end of this project, we will have a 3-D model of a small house that will look like this following:

For those of you who are wondering whether this tiny house is only made conceptually to introduce you with SketchUp modeling. Nope, this is a typical building size in suburban housing projects all around Indonesia.

Although the building is small, I have managed to make it as detailed as possible down to wall thickness, dimension of window/door frames, to approximate size of the tiles we use.

We would assume that the the 3D model we just created as the house that in need for some additional rooms and facilities. Because space limitation, the development will have to go upward by adding another floor. The final 3d model of the two-story house will look this following picture.

Later we will see how easy this is done using SketchUp. As easy as "pull it here, push it there ", seriously …

End Target

The end target end of this tutorial is to help you learn to make 3-dimensional model of the house you live in, and afterward how to remodel the house. I believe by the end of this tutorial, you will have all the skill you need to do this with SketchUp and show it off to your family and friends.